Three Godfathers

I defer to my colleague Amy Davidson’s comparison of Afghan president Hamid Karzai to the perfidious Fredo, from “Godfather II,” but feel compelled to disagree, amiably, when she refers to “Godfather III” as “awful.” I saw it when it came out (though not since), and loved it. First, it’s got the best line in the trilogy, when Al Pacino (in an echo of Coppola’s own return to the saga, even of his career as a whole) says, in a husky whisper, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” (The fact that, as she pointed out to me, the line is an object of comedy in “The Sopranos” shouldn’t count against it.) Second, it’s got the most personal plot line of the three, namely, the death of a child (one of the worst emotional agonies that life can offer, and one that, sadly, Coppola had experienced). Third, what Sofia Coppola lacked in craft, she more than made up for with a presence that owes nothing to the sort of theatrical technique that the intelligentsia too often takes for good acting—but the silver lining to the unfair critical drubbing she received is her decision to direct.

P.S. Strange that there exist three movies with not quite the same title—“3 Godfathers,” John Ford’s 1948 remake of a pair of Westerns; “The Three Godfathers,” from 1916; and “Three Godfathers,” from 1936). Speak of visionary.

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